Last night I dreamed, not that I went to Manderlay again, yet again, yet again, but that I was hanging out with Emerson, Lake, and Lake’s mother, but not Palmer, of whom there was no sign. It was uneventful, as dreams go, but when I woke I did wonder what it might mean, and I decided to ask that question on Facebook Facecloth.

Answer came from William English, who wrote : ”After careful consideration it seems obvious that by omitting Carl Palmer, drummer with Atomic Rooster, and substituting him with Lake’s mother, you are erasing traumatic childhood memories of a “pram cellar” (being an anagram of Carl Palmer). Am I right?”

Eek! It has all come flooding back. I shall now undergo rigorous recovered memory therapy.

“After careful consideration it seems obvious that by omitting Carl Palmer, drummer with Atomic Rooster, and substituting him with Lake’s mother, you are erasing traumatic childhood memories of a “pram cellar” (being an anagram of Carl Palmer). Am I right?”

Eek! It has all come flooding back. I shall now undergo rigorous recovered memory therapy.

ADDENDUM : A particularly bewildering point about this dream is that I was never an aficionado of the band John Peel invariably referred to as Emerson, Lake & Parker, and have never owned any of their music in LP or CD form, nor indeed in cassette or 8-track or mp3, nor in any other format yet dreamed up by sound reproduction boffins.